Hook Loop History

Hook and Loop fasteners have become day by day features of both industry and households. Yet, they have one difficulty: they are too feeble for many applications. Hook and Loop fasteners made of coil steel have now been developed at the association of Metal Forming and Casting of the Technical Universities Muenchen. These fasteners are resistant to chemicals and can hold out a tensile load of up to 35 tones per square meter at temperatures as high as 800°C.

ver 60 years ago when the Swiss engineer and inventor George de Mestral was thoroughly removing burrs from his dog’s coat after a hunting pleasure trip, he stumbled on a creative idea. Based on the reproduction he had practical in nature, he made a fastener from frequent small Hook and Loop, which he afterward named “Hook Loop ." “The matchless advantage of a Hook and LoopFastener is that it is easy to close and open again,” explains Josef Mair, a scientist from the Institute of Metal Forming and Casting (utg) at the TU Muenchen. Because of this, the Hook and Loop principle is put to a very wide range of uses, e.g. as an alternative to shoe laces, to secure checkup bandages and prostheses, and for the cable boots used in automotive and aviation electronics.

Unfortunately, normal synthetic Hook and Loop fasteners are not very challenging to heat and aggressive chemicals. “Things can get very hot, for example, in the automotive sector. A car parked in direct sunshine can reach temperatures of 80 °C, and temperatures of several hundred degrees centigrade can arise around the exhaust manifold. forceful disinfectants are used for cleaning purposes in hospitals, and traditional Hook and Loop fasteners are too weak for use in the construction of building façades,” explains Mair. Under the control of Professor Hartmut Hoffmann and as part of a joint project launched in 2005 with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in close cooperation with partners from industry.